MENLO PARK, Calif., 1 May 2006. SRI International, an independent nonprofit research and development organization, has announced an SRI-managed project called, Novel Information Gathering and Harvesting Techniques for Intelligence in Global Autonomous Language Environments (NIGHTINGALE), a five-year collaboration between 15 corporations and universities. Ongoing since October 2005, the program is funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) under its GALE (Global Autonomous Language Exploitation) program.
The goal of the GALE program is to develop and apply technologies to absorb, analyze, and interpret huge volumes of speech and text data in multiple languages.
The program will initially focus on English, Mandarin Chinese, and Arabic. Automatic processing engines will recognize, translate, and distill data, delivering pertinent information in easy-to-understand form to military personnel, in response to direct or implicit requests.
"By leveraging automatic and context-aware technology and taking advantage of multilanguage, multidialect, and multigenre annotated text and audio databases, SRI's NIGHTINGALE project can help assure that responses to critical information needs are accurate, timely, and relevant," says David Israel, principal investigator of the NIGHTINGALE project and an SRI program director.